It seems like it has been a long time since audiences were given a good movie about magic. Not since Nolan’s The Prestige or Berger’s The Illusionist in 2006 has there been any that come close to being a success. But like those two movie gems, there is something special about magic movies when they hit their mark. They create the awe and wonderment that Hollywood cinema was built on, and this movie does nothing to interfere with that belief.

Now You See Me is the latest project of director Louis Leterrier, known more for his action movies (Transporter 1 and 2, Clash of the Titans) than anything else. A great cast has been assembled including starring roles for Mark Ruffalo, playing FBI agent Dylan Rhodes, Morgan Freeman as magician whistleblower Thaddeus Bradley, and the four horseman magician team of Michael Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt Osbourne (Woody Harrelson), Henley (Isla Fisher) and Jack (Dave Franco). Throw in supporting roles from Michael Caine as a millionaire businessman and Melanie Laurent as Interpol agent turned Ruffalo’s muse, and you have maybe the most star-studded cast of any summer flick. The plot centers around four street magicians who come together to create an act under the name of The Four Horseman. Instead of just wowing audiences with their illusions, they decide that each performance will end with them robbing someone out of copious amounts of cash. Both Ruffalo and Freeman’s characters are hot on their trails for completely different reasons– one to put them in prison, the other to expose their tricks to the public. As straight forward as it sounds, the twists and turns of this movie are abundant and constantly keep the audience on the edge of their seat.

You know a movie is awesome when Morgan Freeman gets to wear a sweet hat and purple blazer

This movie is incredibly entertaining and a delight to watch. You will be hard-pressed to find another movie this summer that integrates comedy and suspense so well. Even though the method of each trick is explained by Freeman’s character shortly after it happens, the audience will still have many questions to mull over throughout the entirety. In fact, there is almost an Ocean series-type feel after each reveal. The back and forth between the affable Harrelson and smug, arrogant Eisenberg is extremely enjoyable, while the role of Ruffalo as a surly detective really shines. One of the really interesting aspects of this movie is the moral ambiguity of basically every character. Who is the hero and who is the villain? It is a very intriguing technique that only enhances the thrill of the movie. The negatives of this movie are two-fold. First, the supposed romantic relationship between Ruffalo and Laurent seems a little forced and bogs down the pace at times. It may be a necessary plot device, but their onscreen chemistry leaves a little to be desired. Second would be the overall filmmaking seems a little second class at times. Don’t get me wrong, the script holds up very well, but Leterrier’s use of lens flares and shaky camera during chases can be a little much to handle. However, neither of these aspects are enough to really detract very much from the project as a whole.

I think the vast majority of moviegoers will leave this movie with a great sense of satisfaction. The premise of this film is fantastic, and one of the few genre movies that gives an ending that does not fail the exquisite build-up. Even though this movie is a pure summer popcorn-flick indeed, the refreshing and original ideas are sure to delight and amaze. This is one film that should not have to beg you to “look closely”.

Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world. How did he do it? Well, I think we all know full well what he did as most of you probably have your Facebook profile open as you read this. The mere introduction of social networking changed the way people live their lives and communicate, in much the same way that the internet and e-mail changed communication in their fruition.

Today, hundreds of millions of lives are paraded to users and viewers of social networking sites, and Facebook stands out among crop. I can remember the early days of MySpace until it became old news once Facebook hit the web. When I joined Facebook, it was university-based, meant exclusively for college students. Not long after, the site was opened up to high schools, and ultimately to anyone. Now it has become a staple in society that anyone and their grandmother uses.

It is safe to say that Mark Zuckerberg has forever changed the world and our way of communication. That is no small feat for a man in his 20s. And while his story may be profound, I had my doubts that a feature film portraying his rise to success would be anything but a dull seminar of comuter mumbo-jumbo. Even when the established director David Fincher came on board to helm the project, it is clear this makes for a striking departure from his previous thrillers Zodiac, Seven, and Fight Club. How could the story of a young web page designer translate into an exciting drama?

Bringing in writer Aaron Sorkin changed things. Responsible for A Few Good Men and Charlie Wilson’s War, Sorkin has a knack for biting, intelligent dialogue. The Social Network survives because of two main ingredients: the fact that the subject couldn’t be more than timely, and the fact that Sorkin’s writing is nothing short of stunning. Many viewers may be quick to dismiss this as what I feared it to be: a lot of techy computer babble. The dialogue is so fresh, however, and so perfectly tuned that I became drawn to these actors simply speaking intelligently (which is rare for a Hollywood film these days, especially involving youth). The characters, while most of them not likable (including Zuckerberg’s character), are sizzling without our approval. Even when the script veers into instances of detailing uploading, downloading, hacking, lines of computer code, formulas, and so much more I wouldn’t even begin to comprehend, Sorkin doesn’t try to bring his audience to school. He brings us into the lives of these characters, and David Fincher utilizes the talents of his actors to present the creation of a website as profound and impacting.

Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland) plays the socially awkward Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg. Desperate for acceptance of his peers, he has trouble channeling his colliding intelligence and self-consciousness when in conversation. This keeps him from enjoying intimate relationships (as evidenced in the film’s opening scene) and invisible to exclusive school clubs. Even when his best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), spends countless hours trying to get into these clubs through his own embarrassment, Mark mocks him out of jealousy. The ‘day of Mark’ eventually arrives, as three Harvard club members, including the Winkelvoss brothers (Armie Hammer) “built of brawn” (as Ron Burgandy would say), recruit Zuckerberg to design a unique home page exclusive to Havard students. Whether or not Mark’s creation would be an act of defiance and resentment against these club members remains a gray area, but eventually over many sleepless nights the design of “the facebook” comes to light with the help of Eduardo and his checkbook. Ignoring the Winklevoss phone calls and e-mails, Zuckerberg launches the site and it becomes an instant hit with unseen potential. Eduardo wants to find advertisers, but Mark wants to keep it clean and think bigger. Enter former Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) to tempt Mark into eating the forbidden fruit and turn Facebook into the hottest thing the world has seen, while leaving Eduardo in the dust. According to Parker: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”

These events ultimately lead Mark to a double lawsuit, one led by the Winklevoss brothers claiming Mark stole and capitalized on their idea. The other lawsuit comes from Mark’s own best friend, Eduardo, seeking a pricey settlement after being sabotaged out of his original shares. The movie cuts between deposition proceedings with this back story that leads up to Mark being the richest 24-year-old on the planet. The material is handled extremely well as written by Sorkin. He will be budding heads with the Nolan brothers for screenplay of the year.

Fincher applies a deft visual aid to Sorkin’s words. The movie is gorgeously shot and continually exciting. His four leads in Eisenberg, Garfield, Timberlake and Hammer deliver very distinct and engaging performances. Eisenberg has sort of become the alternate-Michael Cera, but with the Zuckerberg role he has a chance to one-up his usual socially-awkward characters and make Mark a total jerk whose desires for friendship and status ultimately cost him the one friend he has. Garfield is the heart of the film as the unknowing financial key to Mark’s early success in designing Facebook. His performance details a sympathetic soul looking to share in the success he and his best friend collaborated on only to lose out to a fierce competitor: Mark’s jealousy and envy. By the time Timberlake arrives, he gets to portray one of those juicy playboy roles that all actors dream of. He’s like the Mark Wahlberg of The Departed, only Timberlake doesn’t need a running sarcastic mouth to be cool. Each actor, big and small, complete this arresting movie. However, as good as it is, it certainly isn’t for everyone. If you haven’t been captured by the Facebook phenomenon, or have little interest in the digital landscape of society, then The Social Network may not seem like such a big deal. Only once in a while does the film get lost in its information uploading. That doesn’t keep it from being very good. Is it the real story? Is Mark Zuckerberg portrayed in a harsh light? I really don’t know, but the lawsuits are real, and everyone has their side of a story. Fincher and Sorkin attempt to capture multiple angles, and they do so quite successfully. The Social Network is a writing and acting explosion of fine craftsmanship.

What is with all these zombie movies?? Is our culture really so morbid that we can’t get enough of seeing human bodies hacked to pieces? Zombieland (Dir. Ruben Fleischer) is only the latest in a veritable flood of ketchup-splattered, limb-laden flicks from the past few years in which humans are transformed into flesh-eating monsters and terrorize the few souls unaffected by the radiation, virus, or whatever.

The zombie phenomenon began as a trickle in 1968, with Night of the Living Dead (Dir. George Romero), whose two sequels didn’t arrive until 1978 and 1985. Those three movies were later re-made, however, along with new sequels City of the Dead and Land of the Dead. Add to that the Resident Evil series (Dir. Russell Mulcahy) and 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (Dir. Danny Boyle), and it becomes clear that what once appeared to be a few strange but isolated incidents is now an epidemic sweeping the world. Indeed, a trip to the movie section at Wal-mart will turn up no end of little-known, low budget zombie flicks that never made it to theaters, each boasting its “gruesome” and “shocking” qualities. And now, we are soon to be hit with a remake of the Worst Movie Ever Made, Plan 9 fom Outer Space.

Night of the Living Dead; the first zombie movie, and probably the best.

The term “zombie” originated in Afro-Caribbean folklore, in which the dead could be revived by a “bokor” or sorcerer. By the 1950s, zombism (well, it’s a word now) was caused by radiation, just like everything else back then. More recently, zombism is usually caused by a virus, as in 28 Days or Zombieland.

As the bard will tell you, all fiction eventually becomes a satire of itself. Such was the case in Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead in 2004. Shaun is not the best of films, but nonetheless demonstrates a certain comedic brilliance in the way it backhands the zombie sub-genre. Our hero, Shaun (Simon Pegg), is staggering through his mediocre life, working the same dead end job, day after day, having problems with his girlfriend, etc. Which is why the trailer asks “do you ever feel like you’re turning into a zombie?” As luck would have it, Shaun’s world is overrun by real zombies. But even with a zombie apocalypse is in full swing, it takes Shaun a long time to notice that anything is amiss. One morning, he stumbles, half awake, across a street, past a burning car and a distant crowd of zombies into his neighborhood quick shop. He retrieves a beverage from a refrigerator inside, oblivious to the bloody handprints on the glass door, and proceeds to the counter, barely pausing when he slips in something all over the floor. Finding no one at the counter, he drops some money on it and heads for the door. As he’s leaving, the clerk, now a zombie, comes shambling out of the back room. Shaun yells “hey Eric, I left the money on the counter,” and leaves.

Shaun: A hero must rise. From his sofa.

Shaun and his friends survive one scene by pretending to be zombies; something that Zombieland borrows. Perhaps uniquely among zombie movies, Shaun ends with the crisis actually being solved by the authorities – and the zombies being employed in the service industry. The final scene is of Shaun playing video games with his roommate, who is now a zombie and chained to the wall, lest he take a bite out of Shaun. The point of it all being: If the recently dead did reanimate and seek to feast on human flesh, things really wouldn’t be that different from the way they are now.

But is that such a fresh message? Zombie stories always implied that civilization was inherently fragile and left us wondering if humans were that different from zombies. Dawn of the Dead takes place in a shopping mall, after all. Heck, zombie fiction was probably spawned by the breakdown of societal relations.

Zombieland is definitely more comedy than horror. It’s not even scary, unless you count the occasional cheap shock (industry term for when something jumps out at you). I laughed pretty hard, though. It’s hard to believe a movie that goes through so many drums of corn syrup could be this lighthearted. The main part of the action kicks off in Garland, Texas (“it might look like zombies destroyed it, but that’s just Garland”), where we meet our narrator (Jesse Eisenberg), who identifies himself only as “Columbus,” the city he’s from. He explains his rules for surviving Z-land, which are superimposed on the screen as amusing graphics. He then has a chance to demonstrate them in an encounter with three zombies (below).

Columbus practics Rule 3: Beware of bathrooms; only one way out.

This 3D text actually provides a major source of entertainment for the film, being knocked over by running characters and spattered with gore. You kind of have to see it to appreciate what I’m talking about. Columbus, a virginal nebbish who spent his pre-Z-land life playing World of Warcraft, comments “I might seem like an unlikely survivor, with all my phobias and irritable bowel syndrome, but I have the advantage of not having any family connections or close friends.” However, as he trudges down an abandoned highway, he has to admit, it would be nice to see a familiar face, or just any face without blood dripping from its lips and bits of flesh between its teeth. His wish is granted when he meets Tallahassee, a gun-slinging, whisky-swilling, zombie-killing machine (Woody Harrelson). No sooner have the pair begun to get along than they meet Wichita (Emma Stone) and her sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who swindle them out of their guns and transportation – time after time. Once again, it seems that even those unaffected by the virus are behaving like zombies – as Sweeny Todd put it, man devouring man. Columbus comments, “I’m not sure which was more depressing, the fact that all my family and friends were gone, or that fact that I’d never really had a family.”

Zombie kill of the week?

Z-land diverges from from most of the sub-genre however, because amid all the gore, what it’s really about is the forming, not the destroying, of relationships. After risking his life to save Witchita’s, Columbus concludes “In Zombieland, if you don’t have somebody, you might as well be a zombie.” It’s an odd feeling as the credits roll, and you suddenly realize that what you just saw was actually a feel-good movie.

This flick has some genuinely fun moments, including one of the cleverest cameos I have ever seen, and a climactic scene in which Tallahassee runs through an amusement park with a huge arsenal, doing what he does best. All this, of course, is set amidst a giant playground of unlocked doors and all manner of goods and material comforts, abandoned by man kind. Maybe that’s what it is about all these zombie movies: the thrill of having everyone else out of the way and the world at your fingertips. Plus there’s the allure of a fun war – no remorse about “killing” the enemy. I have yet to meet a reanimated corpse or virus-induced cannibal in real life, but I think with our materialism and violent tendencies, a zombie apocalypse would be the least of our worries.

Featured Reviews

It’s all about the teeth. Aside from the brilliant acting, spectacular setpieces, and sweeping epic scale of HBO’s John Adams, it’s the teeth that stand out more than anything. To wit: as people age, so do their teeth, and in days long gone when toothpaste and mouthwash were as common as combustion engines and power […]

Believe me, I was not planning on making this show part of my daily routine. When I eat breakfast I usually watch 20 minutes or so of a movie, and lately they have been documentaries. After tackling some pretty heavy stuff recently, I stumbled across this odd little gem of a show on the ol’ […]

A few years ago director Davis Guggenheim set out to create a documentary about one of the most iconic instruments in music, and the driving force behind the entire rock and roll scene since its inception: the guitar. His way of doing so was to get the perspective of three musicians, each in some way […]